Friday, March 8, 2013

"Women Warriors"

There’s this play called Lysistrata
written by the Greek playwright Aristophanes in 411 B.C. (if you had saved
your ticket stubs, they’d be worth a fortune today) in which the adult women of
Greece announce that they will withhold sexual privileges from their menfolk if
the men did not stop fighting in the Peloponnesian War.Now women are insisting on – and have indeed
recently won the right to – themselves
participate in wars.

What changed?

And is it really an improvement?

Acknowledgement:On those rare occasions when I write about Women’s Rights – explanation
for that rareness:To come, at the end
of this sentence – I leave myself open to charges of perceived or legitimate
gender bias.I am particularly
vulnerable to that charge, as history has designated me a member of a
generation I long ago labeled, “The Men Who Lost Dinner”, and I have as yet not
entirely recovered from that loss.So
there’s that.Still…

I admit less than complete knowledgeability on this matter,
but apparently, the women warriors in the U.S. military pushed for combat duty,
because, according to the rules, the lack thereof inhibited their career
advancement.

It seems to me, just off the top of my head, that a simpler
solution to that problem would be the less physically endangering, “Change the
rules.”

Rules can be altered, even longstanding ones.During my lifetime, the Catholic Church,
which has been around for two thousand years and is not famous for its regulational
flexibility, has reversed itself on two longstanding requirements – that the
services be conducted in Latin, and the eating of fish of Fridays (the latter much
to the chagrin of the “International Fishmongers Association”, who to this day,
I imagine, harbor the suspicion that the “Beef Lobby” put the “fix” in at the
Vatican.“It’s a cow, Your
Holiness.Consider it a gift.”)

It is not for me to say, of course, but I can wonder why high level administration
positions in the military insist on the prerequisite of combat.Lincoln never served in the military, but,
after some early missteps, he ran the Civil War quite skillfully, compared to
McClellan who, though he saw action during his rise to the top, still considerably
stunk things up.

My late great friend Jerry Taichman never became the doctor
he should have become, stymied by
inexplicable prerequisite of High School French.Some prerequisites are insufficiently related
to the position you are shooting for.Sometimes, especially before one throws oneself unnecessarily into
harm’s way, they simply need to be revisited.

Then there’s the issue of individual freedom, a particularly
sensitive one for women, as their freedom has been indisputably hampered in the
past.

Some women want to fight.And they believe that, in an egalitarian society, if you want to do
something, you should be allowed to do so.

This justification is not always applicable, most notably in
the military, which rivals the Catholic Church in “The rules are just fine the
way they are.”(Orthodox Jews are up
there as well.)

FRIGHTENED SOLDIER:Sir!Request immediate reassignment, as the Front Lines are too noisy and
people’s body parts are being shot off all around me.Sir!”

FRIGHTENED
SOLIDER’S SUPERIOR:So you’d like to be moved back.

FRIGHTENED SOLDIER:Sir!I
was told that the New Military lets you do what you want.

FRIGHTENED
SOLDIER’S SUPERIOR:Yeah, but
not that.

As The Big Chill
anthem tells us, “You Can’t Always Get What You Wa-ant.”And yet, in this case, under the
bullet-riddled umbrella of “Equal Rights”…

You can.

The question is, understanding women’s justifiable demands
for equality in every arena…

What the heck are you doing?!!

Acknowledging that there are way fewer of them than was once
believed, there are still differences between men and women.I mean, do you want to play football too?

I know a few women who
could handle it better than you could, Smart Guy.

I get that, Italics
Girl.But I don’t play football either!

Okay, leave me out of this.I have a wife and two daughters.At no time in their lives have they ever expressed an interest in
combat, or in the injustice of being prohibited from participating
therein.I know “three” is a tiny sample
of women who show no interest in fighting, or in fighting for the right to fight.But my informal guess is it’s bigger.

I don’t want to make a speech.I realize that gender stereotyping has been
damaging in the past.And I know that
America prides itself on individual liberty above all other cultural
values.But…

5 comments:

I say, "If the women want to fight, let them." I don't want to fight and I know a lot of other guys who don't want to fight. They can take our place. Then, if THEY get into a war that we don't like, WE'LL withhold sex until they stop it. Wait a minute... I couldn't do that! And I'll bet the rest of the guys couldn't do that, either.

So, there we are. If we allow the women to fight our wars, we'll never be able to stop them.

And on the same day that this piece was published, a 'girl' performed a work-place shooting in my hometown. Luckily, for the target (so far), it was not a fatal shooting. I believe this equal-opportunity thing has gone at least one caliber too far.